Darkened Skins, Blackened Souls
Analysis of John Keats’ “Isabella, or The Pot of Basil”
Prezi Presentation Version
Global Object: Minerals from Mines
“And for them many a weary hand did swelt / In torched mines and noisy factories” (XIV 107–108)
John Keats (1795–1821)
Keats published Isabella, or The Pot of Basil in the year 1818, in the middle of the Industrial Revolution (1760–1840)
Context to Understand the Poem
- Tragic Death
- Father’s death from a horse accident (1804)
- Emotional, financial shock for the Keats family
- Mother’s disastrous remarriage
- Mother’s return by 1808, only to die of tuberculosis
- Sense of gloom and depravity hang over Keats’s life
- Misfortune vigor him as a poet as he writes to bring solace and meaning to human suffering
- Poet also dies from tuberculosis
- Sense of death also pervades deeply in Isabella or The Pot of Basil
- Multiple deaths of innocent characters mirror the early misfortunes Keats experienced in his youth - Financial Decline
- Keats’s grandmother appoints Richard Abbey (tea merchant) as trustee of Keats and his remaining siblings
- Abbey shares similar characteristics with the merchant brothers in Isabella, or The Pot of Basil. He is deceitful and cunning since he lies to Keats and withholds a generous sum of inheritance of 2000 pounds.
- Keats is forced to be responsible for his younger siblings, torn between being a surgeon and a poet - Political Stand
- Keats supported progressive causes and democratic reform
- Opposed aristocratic counterrevolution on Napoleon
- Political enthusiast
- “Keats himself… was avowedly on the liberal side in the political debates of the day” (Watkins 93).
- Liberal sentiments for social reform
- Association with Hunt also enhanced Keats’s liberal stance in politics - Negative Capability
Keats’s best-known doctrine is Negative Capability. This implies an engagement in the actual thorough imaginative identification that is simultaneously a kind of transcendence. The artist loses his selfhood that demands a single perspective or meaning. The artist identifies with their object and lets that experience speak itself. Both the conscious soul and the world are transformed by a dynamic openness to each other. This transformation is the arts’ truth, its alliance with concrete human experience; its beauty is then its ability to universalize from that experience the enduring forms of the heart’s desires. - Conclusion
Isabella or The Pot of Basil can be interpreted as Keats’s conflicting ideas regarding the Industrial Revolution taking place during the Romantic Period. The poem portrays a pessimistic view and wariness where individuality and humanity may be lost due to science and technology. Where does human essentialism stand in a world where producers are treated lesser than their products?
Mines
Why is coal obtained from coal mines such an important global object during Keats’s lifetime?
Adam Smith (1723–1790)
From his work, “Wealth of Nations”
“in a country which lies upon the river Plate, at the time the direct road from Europe to the silver mines of Potosi, the money-price of labor could be very cheap” (119).
Growth of the European Market due to Potosi
“Since the first discovery of America, the market for the produce of its silver mines has been growing gradually, more and more extensive… Since the discovery of America, the greater part of Europe has been much improved. England, Holland, France, and Germany; even, Sweden, Denmark, and Russia; have all advanced, considerably, both in agriculture and manufactures” (160).
Benefit from Coal Mines
Jane Haldimand Marcet (1769–1858)
“coal mines, which, notwithstanding the great assistance derived from machinery, give work to several hundred, thousand laborers who earn their maintenance, besides the profits of their employer and rent of the proprietor; and the rent is in general more considerable than that of agricultural land, as the produce of coal-mines is more valuable than that of the soil” (277).
- Disparity in value among commodity obtained through nature
BUT Mining comes with problems!!!
“the profits of the capitalist who rents them, and of the laborers who work them, is not greater” (277).
“The risk and uncertainty attending mining is greater than that of any other employment of capital; and accordingly we find both larger fortunes made, and more people ruined in that than in any other branch of industry” (277–78).
- What does she mean by “ruined”?
- Is mining really worth it? Is the entire system and progress toward industrialization truly worth it? This presentation aims to explain how Keats answers this question through Isabella or The Pot of Basil.
Coal was an indispensable resource to fuel the factories that needed to be run for the Industrial Revolution.
So, there is a boost in economy with workers receiving employment and their employers gaining profit, then what is the problem?
Why does Keats shed a negative light on commercializing natural goods?
The exploitation of coal for the Industrial Revolution came with controversy and dissenting voices!
Human Greed and Materialism (continuation of Marcet)
“I am inclined to believe the profits of mining to be rather lower than the common standard. In all hazardous enterprises, men are prone to trust to their good fortune, and generally consider the chances more in their favor than an accurate calculation would warrant. This is evinced by the readiness with which men venture to stake their money in the lottery, though it is well known that the chances of gain are decidedly against them. A mine is a more advantageous lottery no doubt than that of government, but it contains a prodigious number of blanks, and only a few great prizes” (280).
* Miners did not enjoy the same rights as the men who hired them.
* They were means to justify the ends. Human beings are also commodities used to supply a highly demanded resource.
Robert Young, On Miners’ Song:
“Coal mining songs can also show how events linked to everyday practice impinged upon a much wider range of social, political, and economic relations, and they can indicate how the workers themselves viewed and understood their position in the prevailing and developing economic nexus” (68).
“Surviving mining songs… are a situated, contingent, and problematic record of ordinary people’s reactions to the world around [the miners]” (67).
“Song is a further highlight of the self-exploitative nature of pit work” (67).
Are the coal miners truly “men”?
* Miners are not treated like men. Their employers have lost their humanity by treating their employees so.
“Men were being driven on by the piecework system, and… [t]hey had to work irrespective of safety precautions and faced all hazards with a degree of equanimity… miners were not afraid to do this, but one clear economic point also emerges: the coal itself was more important than the men who cut it” (Young 65).
Robert Owen (1771–1858)
- Factory owner who became a social reformer
- Advocated utopian-socialism countering capitalist ideals
- Spoke and advocated rights for the working class
“Why, if you dare venture to exhibit your producers, as you do your products, the world has not seen so sad a sight as would be presented — a motley group, pallid and haggard and sick, laboring under asthma, consumption, rheumatism, fever, poverty, curses!” (2)
- The ones who profit from the mines do not understand the pains of those digging up the mines
- Consumers (upper, middle classes) are unaware of the suffering of the producers (lower, working-class)
- The ones who produce the goods do not benefit from the goods they produce
- Both Keats and Owen are aware that something is wrong with this system
- Too huge of a financial, economic gap between classes (like the one between Isabella and Lorenzo)
The merchants and industrialists of the poem, Isabella’s brothers also “deform” Lorenzo’s body and their sister’s mind.
“Talk of the development of industry: it is the development of curvature of the spine, concave chests, and deformities of mind more hideous even than deformity of body. Time was when those who were industrious could live by their industry. We, however, have come upon a time and a state of things when industry practically, is neither virtue nor a success” (3)
Owen’s solution to this problem is “the substitution of a well-organized communism for competition… [c]oncerted labor, common property, and common culture” (3).
But, what about Keats’s solution…?
Dire working environments of miners and other laborers during the Industrial Revolution create conflict between Capitalism vs. Human Essentialism. Since Keats lives through the Industrial Revolution, this historical time period forces him to be a victim of class disparity and poverty.
Focus on Keats
- Unlike Owen who proposes communism as a solution to the capitalist problem, Keats uses his method of Negative Capability and applies escapism through his poem, Isabella, or The Pot of Basil.
- But, it is an odd kind of escapism because the poem is a tragedy. So, Keats’s method of Negative Capability is a descent into pain rather than romance.
- Keats’s “goal was a kind of aesthetic detachment or ‘disinterestedness’ that could transform pathos into a real tragic vision” (Poetry Foundation).
As the miners sing their songs to laugh at their own misery, Keats writes about his own dire situation by comparing it to Isabella and Lorenzo's hopeless love.
“The poem Isabella has special resonance for Keats, who keenly felt his lack of social status, wealth, and influence, and constantly felt excluded from society’s center” (Edward 30).
* Both miners and Keats are trying to make their situation a little more bearable only for their hopes to be crushed sooner or later, and Keats is definitely aware of this. This is why he does not grant the lovers a happy ending.
Focus on Lorenzo
On ‘Detachment’
- Lorenzo and Isabella’s detachment from society by falling into an unrequited, romantic relationship, boldly resisting class distinctions between them
- Comparable to Keats’s detachment from what “haunted [him] throughout his life: class anxieties, his parents, and his own ambivalence toward the desire to be a popular poet” (Hoeveler 23).
“Fair Isabel, poor simple Isabel!
Lorenzo, a young palmer in Love’s eye!
They could not in the self-same mansion dwell
Without some stir of heart, some malady;
They could not sit at meals but feel how well
It soothed each to be the other by;
They could not, sure, beneath the same roof sleep
But to each other dream, and nightly weep.”
(I. 1–8)
Keats understands that detachment from reality is dangerous. The lovers’ relationship is unhealthy as Keats connotes love being a disease, a ‘malady.’
Lorenzo returns to Isabella as a ghost. This is unrealistic. A fantasy. Isabella is driven mad as a result.
“It was a vision — in the drowsy gloom,
The dull of midnight, at her couch’s foot
Lorenzo stood, and wept”
(XXXV, 273–75)“And constant as her vespers would he watch,
Because her face was turn’d to the same skies;
And with sick longing all the night outwear,
To hear her morning-step upon the stair.”
(III, 21–24)“So once more he had wak’d and anguished
A dreary night of love and misery,
If Isabel’s quick eye had not been wed
To every Symbol on his forehead high;
She saw it waxing very pale and dead.”
(VII, 49–53)
Keats uses Lorenzo to mirror his own helplessness
- Both men are in an inferior / infantilized position in their societal hierarchy
- “Fell thin as a young mother’s, who doth seek
By every lull to cool her infant’s pain:”
(V, 35–6)
‘young mother’ = Isabella / “infant” = Lorenzo - There is an intrinsic, familial hierarchy among different social classes
- The sad tale of Lorenzo “presented Keats with several entrees into his own personal and psychological territory… on some deep level to Keats’ worst fears about his class origins, his parents’ futile and wasted lives, and his own anxieties about his identity and future as a poet” (Hoeveler 322).
- Keats “fled into poetry” (Hoeveler 322). But, poetry also makes him anxious. Poetry and art are also commercialized by capitalism like mines, cerulean, tea, fabric, etc. There is nowhere for Keats to run or escape to, away from capitalism, just like Lorenzo and Isabella.
- “And at the last, these men of cruel clay
Cut Mercy with a sharp knife to the bone;
For they resolved in some forest dim
To kill Lorenzo, and there bury him.”
(XXII, 174–77)
* The lower class is always forced to produce for the benefit of rich consumers. Here, the one sacrificed is part of the lower class (Lorenzo).
Keats produces poems. Miners produce mines. Lorenzo leaves his life as a product for Isabella’s brothers to take without a struggle.
“They pass’d the water
Into a forest quiet for the slaughter.”
(XXVII, 215–16)
Focus on Isabella
Isabella & Keats’s Affinity with Nature
- Where the beloved is: in the forest
- “There was Lorenzo slain and buried in,
There in that forest did his great love cease”
(XXVII, 217–18) - Isabella brings home her cherished part of nature as a pot of basil
- Keats tries to formulate an intimate relationship with nature through poetry
“When the full morning came, she had devised
How she might secret to the forest hide;
How she might find the clay, so dearly prized.
And sing to it one last lullaby
…
The evening came,
And they had found Lorenzo’s earthy bed;
The flint was there, the berries at his head
…
Then with her knife, all sudden, she began
To dig more fervently than misers can.”
(XLII, 337–40), (XLIV, 350–52), (XLVI 365–66)
Isabella is both embracing and exploiting nature for her own advantage. This represents the relationship between man and resource during the Industrial Revolution. Man cherishes natural resources but in order to turn them into a commodity, natural objects (wood, mine, coal) must be removed and displaced from their original, natural environment.
Keats can be equated to both Lorenzo and Isabella, as he is both infantilized and feminized.
“[I]t is Keats who feels scrutinized; it is Keats who knows that his every published word will be assessed by reviewers not by its worth but according to what they consider to be his lower-middle-class birth” (Hoeveler 328).
Keats, a man sacrificed by class prejudice and narrow-mindedness, mutated and damaged!
Therefore…
Isabella obsessing over the Pot of Basil = Keats obsessing over reviews and judgment placed on his poems (his products akin to nature yet manipulated in man’s language)
“And, furthermore, her brethren wonder’d much
Why she sat drooping by the Basil green,
And why it flourish’d, as by magic touch;
Greatly they wonder’d what the thing might mean:
They could not surely give belief, that such
A very nothing would have power to wean
Her from her own fair youth, and pleasures gay,
And even remembrance of her love’s delay.”
(LVIII, 457–64)
Focus on Merchant Brothers
“Lorenzo embodies Keats as victim of class prejudices; the greedy, proto-capitalistic brothers suggest… Keats’s perceived sense of economic victimization by his guardian, Richard Abbey” (Hoeveler 325).
Anti-Capitalist Stanzas (14–18)
Isabella’s two brothers appear and preside over “torched mines” and “noisy factories”; they own slaves who are whipped as they work all day in a “dazzling river.” The brothers are proud of their wealth, but it has made them into cowards. Keats states that the brothers have gone against the nature of their births and have become like “two close Hebrews.”
What are the brothers so afraid of? They were afraid enough to kill Lorenzo and lie to their sister about it. If they have power as they claim, why don’t the brothers kill Lorenzo out in the open? What makes the brothers fearful of seemingly powerless people like Isabella and Lorenzo?
Conclusion: Summary of Argument
- The global objects, minerals such as coal from the mines, depicted in the poem demonstrate Keats’s awareness of the radical change occurring during his historical time period: the Industrial Revolution.
- Keats is acutely sensitive to the class disparity which arose from capitalism and materialism.
- Therefore, Keats reveals his negative perspective on capitalism and exploitation from the upper class to its lower classes through the tragic tale of Isabella and Lorenzo; thus, he expresses his liberal views and pro-human essentialist opinions — despite his fear of his critics.
Works Cited is in the Prezi